The Qualifications for Communicators Trends Survey 2015 reveals that PR measurement is the top skills gap and digital communications/social media is the top skill that respondents want to address in the next 12 months. After measurement the next two biggest skills gaps identified are budget management and crisis management.

I find it particularly alarming that while measurement is the top skills gap (identified by 53% of respondents), strategic planning is only identified by 32%. This is alarming because it is impossible to do strategic planning well without an excellent understanding of measurement and evaluation. Last year research and analysis was the third biggest skills gap, but this has been replaced this year by crisis management which was identified by 37% of respondents.

The fact that digital communications/social media is still the skill that most respondents intend to address in the next 12 months isn’t surprising as it is changing so rapidly. The rise of crisis management can perhaps also be explained by this as companies and organisations are under far greater scrutiny than ever before from individual citizens and special interest groups all of who have the ability to use social media to instantly reveal what they find.

Another shocking finding is that more than a third (35%) aren’t measuring their public relations activity. When I train and do consultancy with public sector PR professionals I frequently have to remind them how good public sector PR is as often they believe that things are so much more sophisticated and professional in the private sector. The reality that I see is quite often the exact opposite and there are often far higher levels of professionalism in the public sector. The findings reflect this as 68% of those in the public sector measure their work, as opposed to just 52% in the private sector. This lack of measurement perhaps explains why measurement is the top skills gap as people aren’t measuring because they don’t know the best methods and tools to do it.

Respondents were also asked how they were monitoring their activities with social/digital media tracking tools, informal feedback and quantitative research (online or face-to-face surveys) ranking as the top three. However, once again there were significant difference between the private and public sector.

This year PR Academy asked a new question – Do senior management teams understand that public relations and communications management is not just a tactic? Once again the public sector out-performed the private sector with a massive 41% of private sector respondents either disagreeing or strongly disagreeing with the statement, compared to just 31% of public sector respondents.

The results reflect my own anecdotal experience as my most popular PR training course is ‘modernised PR’ which teaches digital communications and social media specifically for public relations (most courses focus on just marketing communications or digital marketing). My two fastest growing courses are for the skills identified in the survey: PR measurement and evaluation; and modernised crisis communications. They also reflect the results of the CIPR State of the Profession survey which also highlighted a lack of digital and social PR skills as a major problem for the PR industry.

This is the fifth year that PR Academy has run its annual Qualifications for Communicators Trends Survey to find out more about its students’ status and views on professional qualifications. It was conducted online using Survey Monkey in November and December 2014. The results are based on 123 respondents – all past and present students of PR Academy, who are practising communicator with 86% working in-house.

Disclaimer: I’m a member of the PR Academy faculty and teach on its courses. I’m also an elected member of the CIPR council and teach on its professional training courses (Advanced Social Media and PR Measurement and Evaluation).

The CIPR State of the Profession 2015 report makes grim reading as it highlights that despite 96% claiming that ‘being considered a professional is important’ they don’t actually make much of an effort to actually be professional.

More than half (52%) don’t have a professional qualification and most aren’t even bothering to evidence that they are improving their skills and knowledge through continuous professional development. Just 5% believe CPD is the best demonstration of professionalism, although I’d caveat this by saying that I don’t think it is the ‘best’, but it is one of the essential elements.

The report also highlights the continuing lack of digital and social skills, which I should be celebrating as it evidences the continuing need for my consultancy and training business. But actually, I find it profoundly depressing as if not addressed it threatens the very future of the PR profession. The significant part of this finding is that it is experienced PR practitioners who are the worst. New entrants to PR, with less than five years experience, rate social and digital media management amongst their strongest competencies.

Just 12% of practitioners with more than 21 years’ experience felt confident in their social and digital media management skills. Despite, or perhaps because of, their own lack of expertise 22% of heads of communications see the changing digital and social media landscape as the biggest future challenge.

This is a huge problem and reflects what I typically see. The problem is that as social and digital becomes more important senior practitioners lack the expertise or experience to actually do their jobs and integrate it properly into public relations strategy. As a result they delegate it to the digitally and socially confident junior members of their team, who do get it, but unfortunately don’t have the broader PR experience to be able to do so most effectively. I’ve long argued that is much easier to teach social and digital to a PR professional, than it is to teach PR to a social media expert.

The report also indicates that the majority of practitioners still see media relations as an important part of their job, which is as it should be. Mainstream media will always be a vitally important part of PR strategy, but has never been all of it. That remains true today, but now more people accept the shift in emphasis. When I work with senior PR practitioners one of the fastest and most effective ways to get them to embrace digital and social media is to start with getting them to modernise their media relations. I help them understand how they can become even better and more effective at the part of their job they are already confident at and enjoy. They can learn to use social media for media relations to better understand and interact with journalists. They can learn how media relations can be improved by smart use of SEO (search engine optimisation) and SEM (search engine marketing), as well as by publishing and distributing their own content.

The best part of my job is working with really senior PR professionals – such as heads of PR for global organisations and companies – who see the need for change and aren’t afraid to ask for help. It’s inspirational and invigorating to see how enthusiastically they embrace learning and change.

If you’re a senior PR practitioner, corporate communications or public affairs head who is inspired by the report to improve your digital and social PR skills then get in touch. You don’t need to use social to reach me, you can just give me a call on +44 20 3239 1093.

Open Up! is the title and the sentiment of the report from the Speaker’s Commission on Digital Democracy in the UK. The Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) was asked to submit a report to the commission, which I was asked to write, on how national politicians should use Twitter. The full CIPR submission is available on the commission’s website and I’ve also published it on Scribd (embedded below).

It’s very much a first draft and I’ve already received some valuable feedback from fellow PR professionals, MPs and other politicians. If you have any ideas for additions and improvements then please share them in the comments and I’ll credit you with any that I incorporate into the second draft which will be properly designed with infographics and photos!

The full Open Up! report is well worth reading as it makes lots of valuable recommendations on how democracy can be improved and enhanced by digital and social technology.

By way of background it’s relevant to explain that I’ve been involved in political social media almost since it’s inception. In 2003 I was one of the first politicians in the UK to blog – the first councillor, but beaten by then Liberal Democrat MP Richard Allan (now European director of policy for Facebook) and Labour MP Tom Watson. I’ve been using Twitter since January 2007 and ran what was probably one of the UK’s first ever Twitter campaigns for Alan Johnson MP when he was running to be elected as deputy leader of the Labour Party. Since then I’ve advised numerous politicians and government departments all around the world on the use of social media and digital communications including the European Parliament and EU agencies.

]]>http://stuartbruce.biz/2015/01/best-practice-guide-for-mps-using-twitter.html/feed6PR and social media set for continued growthhttp://stuartbruce.biz/2014/07/pr-and-social-media-set-for-continued-growth.html
http://stuartbruce.biz/2014/07/pr-and-social-media-set-for-continued-growth.html#commentsTue, 15 Jul 2014 11:19:50 +0000http://stuartbruce.biz/?p=2719

Lots of new research around at the moment that point to a positive future for the public relations business. Yesterday, the Financial Times published the fifth FTSE350 Boardroom Bellwether survey which revealed that almost half the boards of the UK’s largest public companies have not discussed their social media strategies in the past 12 months.

“The social media result is particularly striking given that some companies have had high-profile failures in this area.

For example, last autumn, an initiative by British Gas, which is owned by FTSE 100 group Centrica, to use its Twitter account to promote customer service was greeted by hundreds of tweets pouring scorn on the company’s decision to raise energy prices ahead of winter.”

It quotes Robert Swannell, chairman of Marks and Spencer saying discussion of social media definitely belongs in the boardroom. “Increasingly, it’s part of the requirement to be a chief executive that you have someone who is digitally savvy,” he says.

In contrast Sir John Parker, who has chaired several FTSE 100 groups and is currently chairman of mining group Anglo American, is dismissive and thinks social media takes on greater importance if “you’re in the travel business or certain aspects of retailing.” He might have a point if you simply look at how social media can be used for consumer marketing or customer service. He apparently fails to understand social media’s importance for corporate affairs, corporate reputation, investor relations, human resources, CSR and crisis communications to name but a few. The flipside is the potential risk from social media for non-consumer facing companies is potentially far greater precisely because they don’t understand and engage which means they are ill-prepared when they inevitably need to deal with it.

The other interesting piece of research is reported in PRWeek and comes from Weber Shandwick which found that social media are expected to have the greatest impact on the chief communication officer’s (CCO’s) job over the next few years:

“An overwhelming 91 per cent of CCOs expected social media to increase in importance more than other comms responsibilities. The finding was consistent across every region in the study, including North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America. Globally, CCOs expected mobile (73 per cent) and video production (69 per cent) to also increase the most in importance.”

Similarly research by the UK Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) found that the growth of digital and social media means that reputation management is continuing to grow in importance. Of those questioned 51% thought that social media had great potential to grow their business, however 50% also thought it had the power to damage their business.

All of this growth is good for me as it means more opportunities to advise and train in-house PR teams and agencies how they can adapt to benefit from these changes and equally important to minimise the risks. The consumer social media market is saturated with agencies, advisers and social media ‘gurus’, but the corporate and public affairs space still has lots of opportunity.

This is especially true in the developing and emerging markets such as BRICS, south east Asia, the Middle East, central Asia and parts of eastern Europe. This is especially encouraging as much of my work these days is in these markets including Russia, Kazakhstan, Croatia, Estonia, Georgia, Poland, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and India.

If you’re interested in keeping up to date on the emerging trends in modern public relations then you can subscribe to my Future of PR Flipboard magazinehttp://sbpr.co/sbprnews. Or you can contact me directly to talk about how I can help your team develop a social corporate communications strategy and train the team to successfully implement it.

Last week I spoke at the FutureComms14 conference and one of my remarks during the panel discussion on the ‘Anatomy of the Modern Communicator’ sparked quite a bit of feedback, both online and in subsequent offline discussions. While talking about recruiting I said that I’d always prefer to recruit a PR person as it was easier to teach a PR person social media than it was to teach a social media person PR.

It had some people nodding in vociferous agreement and others shaking their heads and tweeting in dismay.

I stand by the remark and find it remarkable that anyone would dispute it. Public relations is a very broad discipline with a wealth of specialisms and a large body of academic knowledge to draw upon. You can’t quickly, fully teach public relations strategy and theory on the job. It easier however to train people in the individual skills and tactics that are part of the public relations toolkit. Indeed what’s in that toolkit is constantly changing and updating, but the fundamental principles of reputation management, engagement, dialogue and relationship management remain. The danger of recruiting a social media expert is that you get someone who is brilliant at using Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, but doesn’t know how to use Facebook, Twitter or Instagram for real strategic public relations.

Of course it is far more complex than that and if I’m recruiting a specialist role such as measurement, analytics and evaluation then I might look at a social media specialist. But, I’d also want someone who was able to evaluate other aspects of public relations so an amazing ability with social media analytics wouldn’t be enough when the alternative was someone with broader PR evaluation skills and the ability to learn social media measurement. Likewise if I was recruiting a media relations manager as part of my PR team I might consider a former journalist, who I probably wouldn’t consider for a broader PR role. But once recruited I’d still want them to undertake formal continuous professional development and study for professional PR qualifications such as the CIPR diploma. How else could they understand how their role and specialism fitted into the bigger picture?

I wonder if the outrage would have been the same if we’d been talking about law? There are some brilliant lawyers who specialise in social media law, but first and foremost they are lawyers. It’s exactly the same with public relations. If you want to specialise in social media, then first and foremost you must be a public relations professional. Exactly the same would apply if we were talking about marketing.

This observation is also based on training hundreds of PR, marketing, digital, social media and communications people in more than 30 different countries.

It’s also important to remember I was speaking at a conference on the future of the communications profession that was attended mainly by PR, communications and marketing people. I therefore wasn’t talking about the wider ramifications of what is becoming known as social business. Indeed, I’ve argued before that there are still very few social business experts as what we currently have are people from a wide range of different professions including PR, marketing, advertising, law, customer service, human resources, finance etc who understand and have experience and expertise in social. Working together they can begin to re-imagine businesses and organisations as more social entities without the rigid silo structures that currently exist.

PR Academy’s annual trends survey has revealed that 47% of its past and present students think measurement is the skill where they have the biggest gap. In separate research Professor Tom Watson at Bournemouth University discovered that 43% of companies are still using AVEs (Advertising Value Equivalents).

Last year PR Academy’s survey showed that digital communications was the biggest skills gap and this year it is still significant as it is fourth cited by 40% of respondents.

However, most respondents still cited digital communications and social media as the one skills gap they would like to address over the next 12 months, followed by measurement and strategic planning

PR Academy also found that 63% of respondents said their employer provided access to qualifications, but depressingly 37% said their training budgets had been cut or frozen by their employer over the past four years.

Professor Watson’s research was a survey amongst PR students at Bournemouth University who had recently completed a sandwich year (2012-13) placement at a PR consultancy or in-house PR department. The students spent nine months or more on placement so can be considered to be valid observers of what was happening.

The research found that AVE was used in 43.2% of placement organisations. Perhaps the most worrying finding was in the verbatim replies which revealed that AVEs were sometimes being calculated by external measurement and evaluation companies that are members of AMEC (the International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication). It was AMEC that published the Barcelona Principles in 2010 so you might expect its members to be at the forefront of not using them.

However, I don’t think its that simple and we should be careful before we condemn companies such as Gorkana, Metrica Cision and Precise as it is one thing to provide AVEs and quite another to endorse them. If clients (or more senior management) are demanding AVEs it is sometimes difficult, if not impossible, to refuse. However, what it is always possible to do is to provide them plastered with a health warning about how idiotic they are and to ensure they are provided alongside measurement and evaluation that actually means something. Hopefully that is what the AMEC members mentioned are doing.

That is exactly what I recommend when I’m providing PR measurement and evaluation training. In my experience even the most difficult boss or client can be won round from using AVEs if you consistently explain why they are wrong and provide a better alternative alongside them in the same report. It is even more effective if you consistently remind the client or boss how much it is costing to to calculate the pointless and inaccurate AVEs. They usually come round to just wanting the more effective report and not wasting money on the AVE one that’s not right.

The findings reflect my personal experience as the topics that are most popular when I’m providing in-house PR training and open courses via a wide variety of third party training companies are:

Innovative public relations strategy – PR strategy and management and how to embed and integrate digital and social into it, rather than simply treating it as a bolt-on

Online PR practice – practical digital public relations and social media skills and tactics that should be incorporated into PR strategy

Monitoring, measurement and evaluation for PR – How every organisation is unique so it’s impossible to have ‘one size fits all’ measurement and evaluation, but there are numerous more effective alternatives to AVEs

The other popular PR training courses that I do that aren’t mentioned in the PR Academy research is online crisis communications which is always in demand and digital public affairs which is becoming increasingly popular.

UPDATE: Richard Bagnall, chair of AMEC’s social media measurement group (and who founded Metrica before selling it to Gorkana) has commented on Tom Watson’s blog and confirmed what I speculated:

“When clients requested an AVE we would always explain why it was an invalid metric and put the case to the prospect/ client for them to use other metrics shaped around their objectives. Where they insisted on having an AVE (often as the only metric they demanded), we would provide it in a report but the report would also contain basic audience reach and frequency metrics for no additional charge. We would explain in writing in the report that the AVE number was meaningless and how it could easily be criticised. “

Twitter disclaimers such as “Views are my own and don’t reflect the views of my employer” are a subject that divides opinion. Some argue that they are an essential safeguard, others that they are meaningless. I’d go further and argue that for PR practitioners (and other communications disciplines) such disclaimers are actually dangerous.

The reason I argue very strongly that these disclaimers are dangerous is that the disclaimer provides absolutely no protection whatsoever and can actually engender a false sense of security.

Firstly these disclaimers don’t provide legal protection. If you say something that you shouldn’t have then having that little disclaimer won’t save you from disciplinary action or even, if your comments are outrageous enough, from being sacked for gross misconduct. The same goes for the disclaimer in your Twitter biography that says “Retweets don’t imply endorsement or agreement”. The fact is you ARE disseminating information and if it is libellous or inaccurate than you can be held accountable.

However it isn’t the legal aspect that makes these disclaimers not just wrong, but reputationally dangerous. It’s the practical reality of how most reasonable people will view them – what the man on the Clapham omnibus will think (in UK law a hypothetical reasonable person).

Disclaimers don’t work because:

Many people will never see them. They will just see your tweet or retweet and never click through to your profile to see your biography and disclaimer.

People will inevitably associate what you say and what you do with your employer. This post isn’t about debating the rights and wrongs of this. It’s simply stating that it is the reality.

For anyone that is even remotely the public face of an organisation or company then this is even more true. So if you’re a senior manager or director, a PR practitioner, a politician, a company spokesperson or any similar jobs then what you do and say directly impacts on both your and your employer’s reputation.

That means you’ve always got to be careful what you say.

If companies or organisations really want to protect themselves from reputational damage from what their employees say on social media then a far better solution than disclaimers is to implement proper social media policies and training. A good social media policy will be designed to make it easier for employees to use social media safely, ultimately protecting both the employee and the employer.

There are countless examples of senior PR people, both in-house and in agencies, who tweet extensively without the need for meaningless disclaimers. A few friends and acquaintances who correctly don’t use disclaimers include:

The current guidance from the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (to be fully transparent I’m a founder member of and sit on the CIPR’s Social Media Panel which produced these guidelines) in its Social Media Best Practice Guide fudges the issue and says:

For example, it can be advisable to add a ‘views are my own’ disclaimer to a Twitter biography, if a practitioner tweets about client and industry related news / opinions, [professional] and also shares their personal views on a subject that lies outside of their work remit [personal], through the same Twitter account.

However, practitioners should be aware that this will not remove the risk of association with an employer, potentially damaging their reputation, and that adding this to a profile has no legal standing in the UK.

This blog post sets out some of the main benefits of blogging for business, public relations, public affairs and corporate communications. It doesn’t just apply to business but could equally well apply to not-for-profit organisations, governments, politicians and non-governmental organisations. It’s a follow up to a post I wrote in December about ‘Why blogging still matters for public relations’ which focused mainly on the professional benefits for me personally.

Many commentator have dismissed blogging as dead or dying, but the essays in ‘The Business of Blogging’ should put pay to that idea and show that they are even more relevant today than 10 years ago.

So these are my top 10 reasons why it pays to blog for business:

Knowledge and expertise – Professional or business blogs enable you to actively demonstrate the expertise and experience of your organisation and its people. No matter what your organisation does there is always a huge range of topics and issues that you can discuss. A blog is one of the most effective ways to showcase this expertise. A blog isn’t the place to talk about how wonderful your company is and to try to sell things. A good blog helps to create a good reputation that improves the likelihood of achieving your objectives – be they sales, recruitment, lobbying or investor relations.

Personality – It might be a cliché to say that people don’t buy from companies, but that people buy from people, but that’s because it’s largely true. A well written blog isn’t simply a dry showcasing of your company, but actually lets the personality of your people shine through therefore creating a far more positive impression of your organisation. It doesn’t have to be the CEO or another c-suite executive that blogs, but it can also be real experts or frontline workers. In fact very often it is these experts, who are too often behind the scenes, who will do most to improve the reputation of your organisation. The best blogs are always written by real people in the company with a by-line to identify who they are. They should never be ghost-written by PR or marketing people, but that doesn’t mean to say the experts who write the blog can’t have professional support and advice with ideas, research and writing good copy.

Transparency – Around the world people are becoming more cynical and distrustful of ‘authority’ – be it business or political leaders or big companies and organisations. They are demanding the truth and rejecting old-style spin and marketing hype. Neither spin nor marketing hype works on a blog so it is an opportunity to demonstrate more openness and transparency. More conservative companies can start with increased transparency on their corporate blogs and once they see that it works extend it into other more traditional channels.

Niche – No matter how niche or specialist your industry or sector it’s possible to publish a compelling and interesting blog. The barriers to publishing a specialist blog are low enough to mean that you can write for small and niche stakeholder groups. Some companies and individuals make the mistake of chasing a bigger audience by writing about unrelated or semi-related topics, in order to attract more readers and subscribers. A small audience that is relevant to your business or organisation is far better than a large one largely made up of irrelevant people. In fact very niche or specialist blogs can be more effective as they are so targeted and interesting to the people interested in that subject.

Trust – A good blog is great for engendering trust. If people feel that they really know an organisation and its people they will be far more likely to trust and respect what it says and does. Because it is two-way and people can comment (and you should respond) it also increases understanding and mutual respect.

Rapid response – The trust that the blog can help to build can be invaluable when an issue or crisis breaks. The blog also provides a place where you can rapidly respond to explain the situation and answer questions and comments.

Content marketing – Advertising agencies and digital agencies are desperately trying to reinvent themselves as content marketing specialists. However, it’s exactly what good PR professionals have always been doing. At its purest content marketing means eliminating the marketing bullshit and actually publishing something that people will be genuinely interested in. A corporate blog is one of the best ways of publishing stuff that people will be genuinely interested in.

Shareable – There is little point in publishing fantastic content if you don’t make it easy for people to share it.You can do this by adding sharing buttons for Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Google+ as well as social bookmarking and news sharing sites such as Pinterest, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Digg, Reddit and numerous others. However, don’t forget email as it’s the ‘dark social media’ that is still used most frequently for sharing. And don’t forget to share it yourself on your own social networks. Another useful idea is to ‘flip’ each new post into a your Flipboard magazine alongside other interesting content about your industry or sector as I explain in ‘How PR can use Flipboard to create magazines.’

Integration – Build a blog and they will come isn’t true and it will only work if it is part of an integrated communications strategy (which includes offline as well as online). A blog is a great place for long-form, intelligent content that has the real potential to inform and influence stakeholders. Twitter, Facebook, Vine, Instagram and other more ‘sexy’ forms of social media can be the ‘sound bites’ that will help people to discover your quality content. Once you’ve attracted people’s attention on social networks your blog can actually influence them. It also provides a social media hub where you can curate your best content from other social media platforms and direct them to other networks where you are active.

Search – If you’re just blogging for the SEO (search engine optimisation) benefits then you shouldn’t be blogging. But there is no doubt that a good business or professional blog can help your search engine rankings. Google is increasingly cracking down on the awful marketing blogs created primarily for search, but this can actually help your blog if it contains genuinely quality posts and articles intended to be really useful and informative to real people. In fact the more specialist your industry or subject area the more likely it is that Google will rank your posts highly on niche search terms that you are writing about naturally.

This year I celebrated the tenth anniversary of my A PR Guy’s Musings blog. Some of the other early pioneers of blogging have recently written about whether blogs are still relevant.

The first was a post by Tom Foremski, who left the Financial Times to become the first journalist to quit mainstream media to write a blog, and the second was a post by Euan Semple, an early pioneer of social media at the BBC.

Euan is still enthusiastic about blogging, Tom somewhat less so. I think the different perspectives are both valid and perhaps reflect different expectations of what blogging would achieve. Tom’s perspective (crudely précised by me so you need to read his original thoughts) was that blogs would provide an alternative publishing platform for quality long-form publishing free of the shackles of mainstream media. Euan’s perspective is that blogging is about “developing our awareness, our communication skills and our collective intelligence.”

For me personally my PR blog has significantly helped my career. Not only did it play a part in me setting up one of the UK’s first online PR companies, but today it means I travel all over the world providing public relations consultancy and training to some of the world’s largest companies as well as governments and other organisations.

But that’s not why I blog. I think Euan captures part of it when he talks about developing awareness and collective intelligence. Blogging about public relations, reputation management, corporate communications and public affairs forces me to think deeply about the what I believe. Because my thoughts are exposed to peer review and criticism I’ve got to ‘up my game’. This mean the quality of counsel I can give when doing consultancy or training is much better than it would have been.

The third reason I blog is to give something back. I love the public relations profession and I want to play my small part in helping it to grow, improve and develop. Above all I want to see PR become more respected and professional. My PR blog is part of my small contribution to that process.

Blogging is about learning from my peers, giving something back, but above all challenging myself to make me a better PR professional.